Reblog

The Short Term Cycle of Productivity

I’m sure I’m not saying anything new that psychology doesn’t explain already. Anyway you may find some answers here.

The Short Term Cycle

When exposed continuously to the same subject (idea, abstraction, project, whatever), even for a few hours a day, the brain creates a short term memory of the content of that subject. The frequency determines the freshness of the content and consequently our capability to create higher abstractions and side thinking on that subject. I suppose you realized at least once that after a long period of intense concentration on a problem it’s now harder to get distracted at the point of having trouble to sleep. I call this short term cycle of thinking, where an idea can be analyzed and exploited easily with negligible effort.

Productivity

Productivity happens when the short term cycle is established and the brain is ready to build knowledge on the subject with ease. Needless to say, the key to be productive is to maintain the short term cycle alive by establishing a daily (or a cyclic) refresh. At productivity peak the refresh can as short as 1 hour/day (depending on the kind of project of course). For software developers an example of daily refresh can be fixing a bug on a project. 1 hour to fix a bug is enough to keep the project alive in the brain without a tangible effort to context switch. For a piano player half an hour of scales are enough. For a runner, 3 miles 3-4 times a week. Of course it depends on your goals. In general, the popular “daily practice” is what creates the virtuoso cycle.

Feedback

Motivation depends on feedback. More specifically good feedback. When the results of some intense work is positive and rewarding motivation increases. When results are absent or bad, motivation decreases. The feedback can be as “stupid” as a number that goes up or down, a changing color, or some modifications of the physical world that can be seen and measurable. But what’s good or bad isn’t always the important factor. Motivation stays up when accepting a challenge for a partial failure. So the important thing is to find a feedback no matter what or how. The more visible and clear the feedback is, the more the motivation is affected.

Distractions

Unexpected, continuous and random distractions destroy the short term cycle. Good and planned distraction are healthy and welcome. The reason is easy: if the distraction is planned and cyclic it just creates the perfect spot for a managed break of the brain. Do you remember what happens when you move to a new apartment? Several unexpected things can happen: the DSL doesn’t work, the fan makes too much noise, there are all the boxes to unpack and so on. This is random distraction that brings the short term cycle to its knees. Focusing on goals becomes difficult, feedbacks are too often negative, motivation goes down if you don’t pay attention. This can result in a vicious cycle, exactly the opposite of the virtuoso cycle of productivity.

Frustration

The problem is that is not always possible to identify when the distraction pattern is about to change to become random and unplanned. When that happens it usually generates frustration, a condition where the problem cannot be fixed and there is apparently no solution for some long period time. It’s also easy to blame some unfortunate “bad shape” when frustration occurs because the cause of the problem is not known. Of course there is a real “bad shape” but if you are an healthy person with just a few colds a year, is pretty much possible that your frustration is not generated by physical conditions.

Self-check

If you feel frustrated ask yourself the following questions:

• Is the short term cycle holding? Are you dedicating consistent and repeatable time to your goals?
• Are feedbacks in place? What “numbers” change by working on the goal?
• Do you find yourself wandering around for a reason you don’t recall? Like I went to the bathroom then I met a colleague, then I went for a coffee, then I don’t remember?
• Do you see a change in the pattern of distractions? Several unexpected interruptions several times a day for a few days for example.
• Are there objective reasons to think that you have some kind of sickness determined by external causes? This is usually something a doctor can confirm.

Based on the answer you can understand if what you are experiencing is a fracture of the short term cycle determined by external unexpected distractions that you didn’t recognize as such.

Taliban Mode

There is no easy solution here. The only solution is temporary deprivation. You need to accept to remove several useful habits and pleasures. Temporarily! For how long it depends but usually weeks. The deprivation is necessary to re-establish the short term cycle and consists of removing useless and useful distractions for a while. Total immersion so to speak. Feedbacks in place are a must. How to find or create feedbacks is a subject for another post. I found mine with the Pomodoro Technique. Taliban Mode is how I call the fundamentalist approach to re-establish the virtuoso short term cycle. When it is back, restrictions can be gradually relaxed. Below an example of a taliban mode:

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What is on the Taliban Mode is very personal. At the beginning it can be more restrictive, for example by limiting (not removing) hobbies and extra-work activities such as sport. The key is to remember that this is just temporary and the result of the effort will be visible only after a few days and more importantly, this is the key to re-establish the short term cycle of productivity. Hope you found this article useful. Let me know how in the comments if you want.